


I wish I had a river I could skate away on

by chickadee



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 18:08:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17288870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chickadee/pseuds/chickadee
Summary: Christmas 1980 and angsty Moony is not in the mood for celebrating. (Title lovingly borrowed from Joni Mitchell's song "River")





	I wish I had a river I could skate away on

It was not the Christmas he had imagined.

He should have known better than to have imagined anything at all, to form any expectations.

_There’s a war on._

As though he could forget. He was living this war. And even if he wasn’t, you heard the words on every street corner those days.

When the wizard pub round the corner from his flat locked up at six bloody o’clock.

“There’s a war on, you know?” Said the chap securing the chains across the door.

When the landlord told him rent had gone up seven pounds from last month.

“The war,” he said with a not-so-very-apologetic shrug as Remus scratched his unshaved chin and wondered how they would swing the increase.

He took another sip from his chipped tea cup filled with the cheapest of cheap gin. It tasted like rotted evergreens which, surprisingly, did not put him in a very festive mood.

He had been invited to James and Lily’s for Christmas dinner. He’d been abroad on a mission for the Order until, Remus glances at the clock propped haphazardly on the linoleum kitchen counter, two hours ago. But he told Lily that he would try to make it over.

“It’s Harry’s first Christmas” Lily had owled him. “We’d like to make it special, even though…” Yes, even though.

_There’s a war on, you know._

Remus took another sip and wondered if it would stop tasting like industrial strength cleaner if he had enough. Apparently, a few cups in, he wasn’t there yet.

He was wrapped in a worn blanket on the extra worn sofa that straddled the line between the tiny flat’s kitchen and living room. In front of him was the heater that last year they’d dressed up as a chimney with stockings and tinsel and mistletoe and this year they could not afford to run.

Remus wished he was drunk. He wished it was not Christmas. He wished it was not so cold in this flat. He wished Sirius would have been here when he’d come back from the mission and simultaneously wished Sirius wouldn’t come home at all. Maybe he would spend the night at the Potters’ home, too blissed out on good cheer and eggnog and toddler godson belly laughs to return to the dreary little hellhole he shared with Remus.

They had found it cozy and romantic, once. Theirs.

Now Remus saw the way Sirius’s eyes darted from the water spot on the ceiling to the peeling paint at the window frames, when he was trying not to meet Remus’s eyes, which was always now. At least it seemed that way.

_There’s a war on, you know._

There wasn’t any gin left in his cup and Remus was considering taking the four steps from the sofa to the kitchen cabinet where they stowed the half-drunk bottle of gin, when he felt rather than heard the front door nearly fly off its hinges.

It dawned on Remus, perhaps more drunk than he initially suspected, that he might be on the verge of being murdered on Christmas. On Christmas! How very dramatic. He laid back on the sofa, resigned to his fate, when Sirius’s tousled black - Black - hair came into sight.

“Oh, you’re here.” Sirius’s voice was full of something heavy and Remus suspected it might be disappointment.

He tried very hard to remember not to remember the way Sirius used to greet him when he’d returned from previous missions, stumbling into the too-small bed they shared, too exhausted to undress, just relieved to be home again, home, and back into touching-proximity with Sirius. The way Sirius would spoon against his back, one eager hand burrowing beneath his jumper, the other worming its way into the trembling, goosebumped space between bony werewolf hipbone and the threadbare waist of his underpants and squeezing tight, branding the shape of his hand onto all of Remus’s unmentionable spaces.  

“Mmm, you’re here” Sirius would mumble against his neck, words heavy with desire and heavier with relief.

This was not like that.

When had it stopped being like that? Remus couldn’t remember. Things like this slip away, he supposed. And what growing up and growing apart didn’t dissolve slowly, bit by bit, the war stole messily chunk by bloody chunk.

But then again, he’s been waiting for Sirius Black to leave him behind since the day they met at age 11.

“Lily held up supper, hoping you’d show,” Sirius mumbled, unwinding his scarf from around his neck. “She was worried about you.”

Remus did not miss the fact that Lily worried, not Sirius himself.

“I’ve only just made it home from the mission,” Remus mumbled back.

“Really? It looks like you’ve been home enough time to swallow two, maybe three, cups of, Merlin what is that anyway? Smells like poison.”

Remus bit back the urge to defend his drink of choice because truth be told, it also tasted like poison.

“I didn’t have time to pick up presents,” which was true but also not true because what he meant was he hadn’t the money to pick up presents.

“None of us did,” Sirius ground out. “No one needed presents. We just wanted to be together.”

The unsaid words hung in the air between them.

_There’s a war on, you know._

Remus knew this could be their last Christmas all together. Maybe it would be. Maybe one day he wouldn’t return from one of his missions scouting the werewolf packs in the east. Maybe one day Sirius would be struck down on his walk to work. That happened now. But only to other people. So far.

“I’ll owl Lily and apologize. I’ll go look for a present for Harry tomorrow. Take it by their place before New Year’s. Maybe you can come too.” Remus meant it as a conciliatory gesture, but it was too little too late. Sirius shoved his hands deep into his trouser pockets.

“Yeah maybe,” he shrugged. “I’m to bed. Are you coming?”

“I think I’ll stay here on the couch.”

“It’s cold,” Sirius pointed out. Remus does not tell him that sharing a bed with a near stranger is much colder.

The door to their tiny bedroom shut gently and Remus realized that they had not even wished each other Happy Christmas.

He scrubbed a hand down his face and wondered how they had cocked this up so badly. How they had gone from schoolmates to best friends to lovers to this, two bedraggled ships passing on a frigid Christmas night.

  
  



End file.
